Reading this progression of monologues delivered, as it were, from the lip of the stage, one could well understand how profitably their writer’s time would have been spent reading, say, Lear’s hoarse regrets; and Othello’s proud furies; and Hamlet’s half-mad calls.

Of the poem’s nine parts, all but one are by the same speaker. A brief overture describes a fall from grace (“Long ago, if my memory serves, life was a feast where every heart was open, where every wine flowed”) and concludes with the storyteller clearing his throat (“watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned”). A tour of human inadequacy follows, a meditation on being that depicts, in a series of what one might more aptly term evocations than scenes, identity’s destruction, the stampeding of self beneath the footfalls of history. For, at its most basic, A Season in Hell is very much what Ezra Pound would call, fifty years later when describing what he believed modern poetry should be: a poem that included history. As such, Rimbaud’s long poem is modernism’s true first throb. But the history here is personal, or is, at least, told as if history were only personal, as if civilization were always a genealogy of self (“My Gallic forebears gave me pale blue eyes, a narrow skull, and bad reflexes in a fight”). For the modern reader who knows a little too much about Rimbaud’s bio, though, the poem, as it continues on, becomes harder to read. We see surprising suggestions from the eighteen-year-old, which seem prophetic: “I’m leaving Europe,” the voice of the poem says, and we cannot help but think of how Rimbaud would soon leave Europe himself, for Africa and places where, as the voice of the poem continues, “unknown climates will tan my skin.”

For in July of 1873, nearing that August border when we are told the poem was brought to an end, Rimbaud was shot, in the wrist, by his lover, Paul Verlaine. And yes, therefore, inevitably, once Rimbaud returned yet again to recuperate in the rural boredom of his mother’s barn, sitting, we can imagine, with a crudely bandaged arm in which a hole was slowly healing, that his wounded present was very much before him as he wrote this poem. It would not be wrong, therefore, when reading the poem’s fourth monologue, the only one spoken by a different voice, to suppose its tonal source, its jilted whine (“How I suffer, how I scream: I truly suffer”) might have a recent basis in Verlaine, now faraway in jail.

And yet, to read the poem only this way would be a pity, for it has a larger purpose, a more mythic register and reach, one that extends well beyond the easy graspings at biography: Rimbaud was drawing on deeper reserves. A life of reading and thinking is not undone by a single shot, and a poem this rich is not explained by a single loss. Rimbaud had wanted, remember, for Delahaye to send him, in May, Goethe’s Faust. This suggests he had the fate of the soul in his mind well before he suffered his most memorable wound. For the season Rimbaud’s Hell resides in was neither late spring nor early summer; not love’s loss nor a farm’s torpor. His Hell was all of these, and so much more. His was informed by Persephone’s—Persephone, who was stolen away to that darkness while tending flowers in a field; although she was returned safely, she could not return completely: because she had eaten six seeds from a pomegranate, that infernal fruit, she had to spend six months every year below the world. And in those six months without her, the world wilted and still does, and what is green goes gray, until she returns again from her dark season. This is a myth that rhymes with Christendom’s the Fall: a taste of fruit so succulent as to leave us forever cast out from a second bite as good. Rimbaud knew these stories, of course, and now was writing his own: about the murders of experience, about the havoc of living in an unamenable world. When, ten years earlier, Baudelaire wrote his epochal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” he may as well have been describing Rimbaud’s eventual accomplishment:

And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted him—this solitary gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call “modernity”; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory. (Jonathan Mayne, tr.)

Toward the end of A Season in Hell, the voice of the poem says: “I never really let myself dream of the joy of escaping modernity’s tortures … since the advent of science and Christianity, man has been playing with himself, proving facts, puffing with pride every time he repeats his proofs, and acting like this is some sort of life! What subtle, idiotic torture; and the source of my spiritual wanderings.” Rimbaud, like so many since, wanted to say goodbye to all that, everything that kept him from what was most human. A Season in Hell found a form for that forceful desire to shed what is worst in us, which is to say our puffed-up proofs. Other breaths followed, though, prose poems we have come to call Illuminations, fragments that were Rimbaud’s last works, traces of a genius running out of time and mind for poetry. They are postcards to readers from a reader, things seen and imagined, before Rimbaud at last left the darkness of writing, finally—and we will never know whether gratefully or regretfully—behind. A Season in Hell, though, was this poet’s great last gasp.

—Wyatt Mason
    Winter 2005

CHRONOLOGY